Sil woke to the stench of ammonia. It jolted her back to consciousness like a hot poker driven up the nose. She drew in a sharp breath, coughed, and continued for long enough that she felt she might spit out a lung.

Her head throbbed.

Her back cracked painfully when she tried to squirm away from whatever emitted that awful stink. Her heart rate threatened a fatal outcome.

“See? Right as rain. Nothing harmed.”

The voice was new, speaking from the side. By the time her vision cleared of tears, hands held her shoulders and guided her upright.

“It’s me, Sil. Relax. It’s ok.” Vergil’s voice accompanied the boy’s steadying presence at her back. “You’re safe. The big spider’s gone.”

Through gasps for fresh breath and wild panic, she could see two more people looming above her. Tallah drew herself up, tying off a small, blue satchel.

Smelling salts? She recognized the bloody thing at a glance.

Someone else stood next to the sorceress. Sil’s heart hitched in her throat on first sight, fearing Erisa. That’s not right, a part of her observed. This newcomer was entirely different from the pieces they’d seen growing out of the spiders.

“Wh-Who?” she croaked.

There was blood in the back of her throat, or at least the taste of it. Swallowing hurt. Talking barely produced a rasping whisper. She’d screamed herself hoarse.

Tallah moved closer and offered her left hand. The right was still as stump, neatly cut. No bone saw could have produced that perfect effect. She also missed half her sleeve and all the limiters that had been on that arm.

“Who’s she?” Sil leaned on Vergil for support once up on her own two feet, her head spinning.

“Glad to see you still kicking,” Tallah answered.

“Daughter Dreea, explain yourself,” the albino girl demanded. She came to stand next to Tallah, fists on hips. “What is this nonsense about your name being Sil and being an Adana? I gave you no permission to demean your calling.”

The words cut straight through whatever complex set of feelings Sil experienced just then. Pain, fatigue, confusion, all melted down in the furnace of rage, painting her sight red and her mood black.

“Excuse me?!” She shook free of Vergil and stalked forward, barely stumbling. Her voice rasped but she didn’t care. “Who do you think you are?”

The girl barely reached her chest but the intensity of her red gaze made her seem much more imposing. “Your god—”

Sil struck her clean across the face, hand moving before her mind finished reeling. After the horror of the last day and seeing what had become of Erisa, how could she not strike whatever called itself a goddess? Her goddess?

“Don’t dare,” she hissed. “What goddess are you? Where were you? What right have you to demand anything?!”

She meant to strike her again but her hand wouldn’t obey. Tallah had grabbed her wrist and held it fast, a half-smile on her lips.

“As entertaining as this is, I don’t think it’s a good idea to strike her,” the sorceress said.

“You’d have me kneel? To her? After all this?” Sil wrenched her arm away and gestured vaguely to encompass the entire city.

“Absolutely not. Just don’t hit her.” Tallah inclined her head and Sil’s gaze followed to the mound of steaming meat behind them. “That’s what she made of the beast giving me grief. I’m rather certain I can’t defend us if you piss in her coffee.”

She turned back to the goddess.

“Where were you?” she demanded. “Where were you when all of this happened?”

Panacea—if that’s who she truly was—regarded her with a mixture of surprise and anger. Sil’s strike hadn’t even budged her chin, but a pink palm imprint shone on her cheek.

“As I was explaining to the sorceress before she insisted on waking you, I have no idea where this is.” She glared at Tallah and then back at Sil. “I will forgive you your outburst. Once. Now, kindly explain before you run my patience ragged.”

Vergil offered Sil a canteen of water. She drank deeply, cool water steaming the coals of her anger, its touch a balm on her ragged throat. Her goddess had failed here! She had failed that young girl and condemned her to this wretched fate. And now, she’d killed her, just like that.

What use was a goddess if she couldn’t even protect a child?

“You sent Erisa here, and allowed all of this to happen.”

“All of this… what?!” The goddess raised her tone. “I need—Actually, no.” She raised a hand and Sil dropped to her knees, every muscle in her body screaming as she was bent forward in supplication.

Panacea flicked her forehead. A light tap that sent Sil’s head spinning as if struck by a shovel.

“Ah! Now I see.” A dark frown creased the goddess’s face. “Lovely. Right under my nose. Of course I had no idea. Fuck that Brachus and his gaggle of imbeciles.” She lapsed into mutterings filled with pointed invective, pacing around the brutalised clearing.

Sil dropped to her hands and knees, released. Again, Vergil helped her rise.

“Can we please stop attacking one another?” he asked, a note of exasperation in his voice. “There are worse things in here. Maybe we can focus on not attracting them?”

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“We’re the worst things in here,” both Tallah and Panacea said in unison, then glared at one another.

“Daughter—” Panacea started, immediately stopped and let out an annoyed sigh. “ Daughter Silestra, I give you my word that I couldn’t have known what went on in here. Coming through the barrier shielding this place was more effort than I can describe in ways you could understand. They’ve deployed an imperfect copy of my own protective lattice, one designed specifically to keep me out. I did not even know it existed. You walking in here opened up a passage for me to follow.”

She raised a hand as Tallah opened her mouth.

“You both have questions. I commend you for them. But I have little time and much to accomplish now that I understand the situation. Maintaining coherence, even projected as I am, is spectacularly difficult. I would like to get my daughter back since I’m presented with the opportunity.”

“You’re not really here,” Tallah said. “This much raw power in a mere projection?”

“Precisely. And even so, there are forces becoming aware of my activity. I do not wish their attention drawn here or to you. Do you understand?”

“Not in the slightest.” Tallah shrugged. She gave Sil a long look. “Try and make some sense. What did you just do to Sil?”

“A mere mind touch. Nothing to harm—”

“You promised that can’t be done,” Sil spat. “It’s in every text: no healer may be mind touched.” The very notion of it was ghastly.

“May being the operative word in there, daughter Sil.” Panacea turned red eyes on her, and an apologetic smile. “I make sure you cannot do it to one another. But it can be done. Creating the kind of protection your friend here uses is too difficult to maintain, and is prone to failure. I prefer locking it away from your use via conditioning.”

Sil’s world slipped out from beneath her feet.

“You lied to us…”

“Quite an impressive jump to that conclusion. In the strictest sense, I do lie, yes. Is this relevant for anything? Or are you simply intent on remaining petulant?” An evil smile crept across her face. “Might you like me to count the number of touches you’ve performed without informed consent?”

Sil swallowed her next protest and it went down kicking. Vergil was just one. A rush of many other faces and their accompanying memories flashed across her mind’s eye, some of them stoking her headache.

“I thought not.” Panacea came closer and Sil drew a step back, her anger beaten back into shame. “I am willing to forgive some things, for now, due to circumstance. I expect you to explain yourself later, daughter Silestra. I expect you to explain why you saw fit to bury Dreea as you did.”

Sil took another step back and yelped as she stumbled over Vergil. She nearly fell.

“Vergil,” Tallah called the boy to her. “Let Sil deal with her mommy. You go and fetch my arm, please. It’s back there, by the churned earth. I should be able to reattach it before the knowledge slips from me.”

“How much blood did you lose?”

Sil turned away from the goddess’s red glare, feeling very much like she’d been scolded by one of the School’s matrons, now needing to make herself useful. Tallah’s lips were near parchment white and purple bags hung beneath her eyes. It was a miracle she was upright at all. How she held her stump without cauterising it or, at least, having it wrapped, was nearly imbecilic.

“Can you open your rend? We’ve got bloodberry tonics stocked.”

“I can barely keep my eyes open and my feet under me,” Tallah answered, swaying in place. The rush of battle was leaving her and it showed in her stoop. “I’m lucky I can even walk. Anna’s slipped away from our grasp when this one tried a touch on me.” She gave Sil a tight-lipped half-smile. “Not my finest moment.”

She made her way to Tallah and slipped her remaining arm over her shoulder.

“Lean on me.”

“I don’t fancy eating grass just yet,” Tallah chided. She stumbled and nearly dragged Sil down.

“Don’t be an arse. I’m fine enough. I feel better.”

Panacea raised a white eyebrow at them. “If you have your arm, I will reattach it. It’s not an issue. You shouldn’t be walking about after an amputation like that.”

Tallah grinned, “Why are you even here? Since when do gods meddle when it doesn’t benefit them?”

The goddess let out a long sigh and had the grace to look abashed. “I did not take losing an Egia daughter well. You might actually say I took it… poorly. I may have said some unkind things to that girl, Catharina, when she brought me the news. May have promised doing some unsavoury things if she ever showed her face to me again.”

She blushed bright pink, washing out the signs of Sil’s slap.

“My system’s been running a passive check for any signs of Erisa for nearly two centuries. I received confirmation today and rushed on-site.” She gestured vaguely at the walls and the forest. “This place is so well shielded that I couldn’t penetrate easily once connection was achieved. I imagine my coming caused a lot of discomfort for you, daughter. It was not by design.”

“You nearly got me killed. Why can’t I channel?”

“Simply put, because my transmission is much stronger than your flow of illum. You can’t overcome the kind of volume I’m pushing through. My advance warning should have made you much more receptive to my coming, but even that got scrambled.”

Vergil returned with Tallah’s severed arm held out in front of him, head turned to the side as if ashamed of looking at it. Panacea took it and inspected the bloodless cut.

“I will not heal you fully. Even with the nerves severed cleanly, there will still be damage. When you’ll come see me, I’ll finish the work properly, or fit you with a prosthetic.”

“When we’ll what?” Tallah asked.

“Come see me.” Panacea made it sound like the most natural follow-up to the entire mad event. “You and I have a lot to discuss, and we can’t do it here and now. Time’s short. I’ll expect the three of you at my School after you’re done here.”

A flick of her fingers cleared away the grime accumulated around the wound.

“This will hurt. And it will not be as good as before. I am simply too far away and the interference too great for me to risk anything more than a simple attachment. Once the pain passes, it will be numb. Do not use it for anything too demanding until we finish the work properly. Is that clear, sorceress?”

“Just put the blasted thing back on. It’s starting to bother me not having it.”

“As you say.”

Tallah screamed as Panacea used a healing weave Sil had never seen before. Regeneration wasn’t something taught to them at the School, nor reattachment of limbs. That was left to the Sisters, their own goddess and their trees.

Panacea herself was different from any depiction she’d ever seen of the goddess. No wide hips, generous bosom, or motherly demeanour. This real one was, at best, a girl. Her physique was willowy, skin parchment-white and smooth as marble. If not for the pink of her tongue and the red of her eyes, she wouldn’t have been much different from any of the statues lining the walls. Less benevolence, more repressed rage.

“Stop screeching,” the goddess complained as she took her hands away. Only a soft scar remained on Tallah’s bleached skin, a ring around the midpoint between wrist and elbow to mark where the arm had been severed. “Daughter Silestra, if you have some poppy or snapper’s stem, they should be sufficient to numb the pain. There’s a good girl.”

Luna had come out from wherever it had hidden and climbed back up Vergil’s shoulder to stare at the goddess. She, in turned, stared back.

“Wonderful little creature.” Panacea scratched the spider across its back. “Bring this one too, when you come. I’d love to make a study of it.”

“Uhm…” Vergil stammered, his mouth opening and closing several time. “You… you said you’ll get to me. Do you know something about me? Can you tell me why I’m here?”